tutorial

CAPs are a great transitional move that can be used to spice up hybrids or even just on their own. They used to be considered pretty technical, but I've seen a lot of people nail them within their first year of spinning. This is the method I've seen most often succeed for teaching beginner or intermediate spinners how to do them and it's inspired by a method for teaching triquetras I saw in an old Alien Jon video.

I've been playing around with a lot of single poi manipulations of late and kept finding myself holding both ends of the poi and not knowing what to do with it. This trick came out of trying to find more options for this position. If you can do forearm transfers straight back and forth, this move is a great way to break them up.

This was a cool move I picked up from Rei Reynosa at Spark Fire and Flow Festival last weekend. It very elegantly combines elements of three important facets of tech poi: quarter-time moves, toroids, and inversion/introversions. Here is the original move, plus a variant that includes a body tracer.

Back at FLAME Festival in Georgia, Kory San and I had an interesting conversation after watching some of Ted Petrosky's body tracers. We realized that many of the body tracers he was performing could also be considered hybrids and we wondered then whether all hybrids that mashed up inspin and antispin flowers would have body tracer corollaries.

Back at FLAME Festival in Georgia, Kory San and I had an interesting conversation after watching some of Ted Petrosky's body tracers. We realized that many of the body tracers he was performing could also be considered hybrids and we wondered then whether all hybrids that mashed up inspin and antispin flowers would have body tracer corollaries.

Several weeks ago I uploaded a tech blog based upon a conversation Alien Jon and I had at Spin Summit wherein he outlined the idea that one could think of inversions and introversions as creating different cross-point locations around the hands. I did a video outlining this idea, but the feedback I got was that I was too far away from the camera to make the concept clear. Here are all the different cross-points revisited and demonstrated in two angles with slow-mo.

Back at IgNight Festival in LA, I worked on a hybrid I'd never seen performed before that mixed up an isolated pendulum and a unit circle extension. By strange coincidence, I happened to see Ronan use another hybrid based in pendulums and extensions, but his used a CAP and a point isolation to achieve a slightly different effect. The two moves utilize a very similar kind of movement and work together really well.

The partner poi weave is not only easy to learn, you can teach it to a complete poi neophyte in under 10 minutes! Here's a little bit of guerilla street theatre: I found Jerod here in Lafayette Park and used him as a guinea pig to both teach the partner weave as well as demonstrate how easy it is to pick up and learn. Thanks so much to Jerod for being a good sport! :D

I have a performance coming up with Contradiction Dance for which I had to come up with a solo poi piece. Here's a couple sections of the piece that I've been working on in the past couple weeks. I'm sharing them because I'm hoping that the choices I made in putting these elements together will help some of you out there working on your own pieces.

A grab-bag of hand-switching throws I've either been working on or have encountered in the past couple months. The first is a triquetra vs pendulum hand switch Noel came up with during the same spin jam where I started working on the triquetra vs pendulum throw from the last tech blog. The second is a hand-switch that comes out of a snake that I've had a hell of a time getting clean these past few months. The third is a hand-switch I spotted Matt Cullen using a lot during a spin session he did at PEX Summer Festival.